News tagged with spending

More than half of likely voters doubt that the United States will be the No. 1 world leader in science, technology and health care by the year 2020, according to a new national public opinion poll commissioned by Research!America. ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- The National Academies in the United States, made up of the four organizations: the National Academies of Science and Engineering, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, has issued an ...

(AP) -- Home video spending in the U.S. fell 2 percent to about $18 billion in 2011. A surge in the popularity of movie streaming services like Netflix Inc. and gains in Blu-ray disc sales helped offset some of the drop ...

Americans typically spend $70 billion more in December than in the average of November and January (the months around December). In a recent National Science Foundation-sponsored interview, Joel Waldfogel, the Carlson School's ...

Consumption (economics)

Consumption is a common concept in economics, and gives rise to derived concepts such as consumer debt. Generally consumption is defined by opposition to production. But the precise definition can vary because different schools of economists define production quite differently. According to some economists, only the final purchase of goods and services constitutes consumption, and every other commercial activity is some form of production. Other economists define consumption much more broadly, as the aggregate of all economic activity that does not entail the design, production and marketing of goods and services (e.g. "the selection, adoption, use, disposal and recycling of goods and services").

Likewise, consumption can be measured by a variety of different metrics such as energy in energy economics . The total consumer spending in an economy is generally calculated using the consumption function, a metric devised by John Maynard Keynes, which simply takes the aggregate disposable income and multiplies it by a "marginal propensity to consume". This metric essentially defines consumption as the part of disposable income that does not go into savings. But disposable income in turn can be defined in a number of ways - e.g. to include borrowed funds or expenditures from savings.